Brides Against Breast Cancer

I have long known that the most important item of clutter to let go of will be my wedding gown. I'm four foot eleven. There's very little chance my daughter or anyone I know would ever be short enough to use it, assuming they would even want to when it's 20-30 years out of date. If it were clean, I think I could let it go easier. We could never afford to have it cleaned after the wedding, and the early years were lean ones to say the least. So any extra money we had from time to time was spent on things or experiences we valued more than the cleanliness of my wedding gown. It's never been housed neatly in a box. It spent five years hanging in a plastic cleaners sack within inches of a bright window. Talk about good preservation conditions! Since the big move, it has literally had no home. It has gone from a pile on the floor of our closet to a pile in the trunk of our car, to being used as a Halloween costume (which proved I'll never be able to fit into it properly again after my ribs expanded during child-bearing), to a pile on top of the stack of storage containers in my bedroom...and everything in between. There is no where to put it, and it's dirty and slightly torn around the bottom edges from walking across campus to our reception site after the wedding. I don't need to keep it. But I do. I hauled it all the way across the country with me because of its sentimental value. But why? My feelings toward the thing are bittersweet. It never looked that good on me. The lady who altered it said it couldn't be altered to make the front smooth in the way I wanted, so I resigned myself to that fact and tried to stand up straight to disguise it. It buckled in an annoying fashion, and I didn't like that, but there was nothing I could do about it at that point. However, my brilliant photographer cleverly had me contort myself for my bridal portraits in a way that not only made the dress look stunning, but it made me look like I had something to fill it up! The three-quarter length portrait makes me feel good about how I looked, even though I know it bugged me that, after seven inches were removed from the bottom, it was a poor choice as far as its shape/proportion for my body type. (And I LOATHE the portrait my mom has hanging in her house because she insisted on its being a full-length shot to match my sister's. I feel bad every time I see it there.) I loved how the buttons looked down the back, but that was never entirely captured on film, so that's too bad. But mainly I bought it because it was 75% off, and it was the nicest cheap dress I could find, and I loved its simplicity and how it looked on me when I was standing on a tall box so it flowed down all the way. After alterations, however, I was a little disheartened, but still on the wedding high so I didn't let it get me down.

Clearly, it needs to either go away so someone else can use it, or be reincarnated. I have imagined how great it might be to have someone who knows what they're doing make it into a fancy dress for Ava to wear as a child. I thought about asking Ginger if we could do that for Ava's flower girl dress for her upcoming wedding, but it would clash with Gin's dress color, so I didn't. I have thought about cutting large sections of fabric from it, preserving the button section in the back, and keep those parts for Ava to use in her wedding one day if she should choose to make them into her ring bearer's pillow or a table covering or something. But then I'm mutilating the dress and ensuring that it will never get used as a dress again.

If I were an average or tall size, and I felt sure someone could use it despite the dirty & frayed bottom edge (alter it shorter), I would probably have sucked up my sentimentality and taken it to a consignment shop or even Goodwill by now. But I just don't believe it would be useful as it is. So then I go back around to the idea of making it into a fancy dress for Ava...even if it's just for dress-up during the upcoming phase of imagination.

Anyway, I found a way less conflicted brides can bless others with their wedding gowns, bridesmaids gowns, etc. Through the Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation, brides can donate these things for the foundation to auction off to raise money for breast cancer research. It's called Brides Against Breast Cancer, and I think it's a great idea. I only wish my gown were an average length, clean, and useable to them so that I would stop saving it for "something."

Molting

epiphany (noun): an intuitive grasp of reality through
something (as an event), usually simple and striking

I recently received an epiphany. It has taken me a long time to get to this place. Oddly enough, it is a shot of reality regarding my clutter. One might expect an epiphany to be of a more profound nature than that, but it has been quite profound for me nonetheless. I have suddenly realized the reason I haven't successfully let go of all of my clutter during past de-cluttering episodes. It is time to for me to molt. I need to allow myself to let go of all the little representations of past versions of myself. If it doesn't fit me now, both literally and figuratively, then I need to release it and move on with being who I am right now.

We are all made up of past experiences (good and bad), people we know and have known or encountered along our life's journey, places we have been, ideas we have entertained, etc. Who we are changes daily, even though we aren't noticing it. Sometimes we wake up one day and notice that wiry gray hairs have moved in on our heads. (That didn't happen over night.) Or we realize we have dropped an old hobby somewhere along the way. Or we don't really like sweets that much...when did that happen? I used to ride my bike almost every day as a teenager; I wonder when I stopped. When I put my bike away that day, did I know it would probably be the last time? Things like that just happen, and we hardly notice until we are looking back from the other side of life changes. It's like we get pulled by the undertow...the way we can stand and play out in the water at the beach and look up five minutes later only to realize we are thirty yards down shore from our stuff.

I got swept up in the sea of life's sweetness many years ago, and yesterday I looked up and noticed am one hundred yards down shore from most of my stuff, and now I am realizing that it might be okay to just leave it there and move on. I am not who I was twenty years ago, when I was collecting bookmarks, pencils, and those big obnoxious buttons we always wore for camp or school spirit. But I still have a box of bookmarks, pencils, and buttons. I am not who I was fifteen years ago, when I was entering a life stage wrought with worry over who was "best friends" with whom and where I fit in the mix. But I still have unpacked boxes labeled "Nostalgia" and about a million photos of my friends from different life stations, most of whom I do not even keep in touch with now. I am not who I was ten years ago, when I was finally settling into independence but feeling the weight of its consequences bearing down on me. And yet I am only recently letting go of old class notes I never look at, letters from financial aid, mail from the dorm years. I am not who I was five years ago, when I was still pretty newly-married, still working and taking classes on the side, slowly chiselling away at my hard-earned degree. Isn't my degree the only thing I really need to keep? (And sadly, it's in its box in my closet.) All of my accumulated stuff that mattered at the time just has a way of growing into a beast that wants to eat me up, or at very least snuffs out my utmost enjoyment of the present.

Every day brings change, as it should. And I have been changing all these years, which I knew. But the connection I never made before is my stuff...the baggage I've collected along these life phases...just keeps hanging around even when it no longer fits with who I am anymore. It's time to shed these layers of Past that are suffocating me so that I finally feel what Peace is in my home, so that I can finally feel what the current me is like when unburdened and free to let go when letting go is what nature intended all along.

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still. -Italian Proverb